1939: Worst Wake-Up Call Ever

I know, I have a weird fascination for “The Gift Wife.” I’ll stop, I promise.

There’s plenty to flinch over in this tiny excerpt, though, from the image of the black servant that seems to be taken straight of out blackface minstrelsy, to the text, where the gift wife talks about how great it is to be a slave. Cringeworthy, but not all that unusual in 1939, and frankly, I’ve seen a lot worse from this time period and earlier times.

It seems to me that waking up from a bender in a foreign country (the exotic land of “Kossovo,” by the way), having accrued somebody else’s wife and servant and having lost the kid you were taking care of, would not be pleasant.

About Kari Lucin

Kari Lucin is a staff writer for the Jamestown Sun of Jamestown, N.D., a regional news site at jamestownsun.com, where she writes, dabbles joyfully in multimedia, and updates social media content.